I'll also second that. I live in Hawaii and make a nice living as a 40-hour-a-week programmer/tech lead. Everything the parent poster (in Orlando, FL) said about the job is true.
I've performed some boring tasks, but the good has greatly outweighed the not-so-good, and the three companies I've put my previous 20 years into have all seemed to value employees with full lives.
Other than a couple of years with Sears, and a summer swabbing toliets, all of my working life has directly or indirectly helped to give the American warfighter the edge. If you're not comfortable with that line of work, either laugh it off (I don't kill anybody, the guys and girls down in the proximity fuze group, they kill 'em), or work for someone else.
BTW, defense work ain't all Republican$ or Dubya supporters by a long shot. We're all adults here, and most can see beyond the idiot du joir.
Mike Powell is just another well connected cog. Anyone, anyone who agrees with the claim that a corporation should be able to own the majority of a broadcast and/or print medium in the US due to competition with new technologies is either naive or a corporate stooge.
Rupert frickin' Murdock owns a major piece of satellite direct broadcast, which as a whole is almost a monopoly. Most of the internet content that most people see and hear is owned or controlled by the same faces that own/control existing modes of info transmission.TCP transmission has become very concentrated, as has cellular infrastructure.
So, where's all this competition Mr. Powell talked about? It's nonexistant. It's looking like the stewards of US industry didn't mind the previous Soviet command economy per se, just that it wasn't them in command.
The upshot is that eternity is an fscking looooong time, long enough for the trillion or so years until the last star dims to be but a tick in time. Time enough for the biggest black holes to evaporate, time enough for protons and neutrons to decay. Time enough for the likes of you and I to go nuts waiting for the other shoe to drop. Plenty of time to decide, lets blow this chicken stand for a party with some action.
I believe the Economist touched on the main reason most of us probably wouldn't make it to 1000 years anyway... everyday fuck ups. When you and I talk about risk aversion, we're probably talking something that'll kill us right away.
For someone whose body might be good for a thousand years, all else being equal s/he is probably going to slowly knock the shit out of themselves. Think of the accumulation of injuries many of us have picked up over 20, 30, or (for me) 40 years. Hell, by the time many people make it to 60, they're pretty beat up even if basically healthy.
Now try avoiding all that wear and tear with ten times our current reasonable max lifetime. How boring of a life are we willing to live to avoid twisted ankles, separated ribs, bumps to the head, or food poisoning, not to mention the everyday accumulated risk of transporation, equipment failures, natural disasters, screwing in a freakin' light bulb. The mind boggles at the possibilities. Give me a shot at it!
Good show, ol' chap. ALL of my purchases have to go through...... nobody.
Ah, spoken like a true soon-to-be multiple divorcee or comfirmed bachelor.;-)
Getting back on topic, Apple has already recouped their investment and then some on the iPod. Given that all Pods are made in China and there's plenty of margin to shave, I'm guessing that when the current fad passes and high capacity, solid state mp3 players are a commodity, Apple could still be a major player if branding still matters. Whether Apple elects to play is the only question.
That the "rock" might be a melted piece of aeroshell ain't a half bad idea, considering that the rest of the immediate surroundings are covered with crap from the impact. However, there are a few clues I think point away from that:
the blob seems to be about the thickness of a good skipping stone, while the aeroshell is mostly honeycombed aluminum or titanium, made of metal sheets much the same thickness as a soda can.
If enough Titanium melted from the aeroshell to make that one blob, it wouldn't be the only blob, and we wouldn't have enough rover left to take its picture.
The rock is embedded in the dune such as to suggest wind has had time to blow the sand around it. Other evidence suggests that the various sand ripples you see haven't moved much in thousands of years. The grains in the surface crust are somewhat cemented together, and the thin Martain wind has a hell of a time moving a grain of sand, much less make an impression on the crust over the course of a year.
It's not true that it's open season on public personalities, just that said personalities have a much higher burden of proof than - say - me.
Depending on the jurisdiction, it often appears that the BS threshold is so high as to make defemation of public figures outright legal. The reason is that courts feel that the right to openly discuss those in power outweighs the powerfuls' right to slap folks talking stink about them. Movie, tv, and recording stars are for the most part collateral victims.
I might point out that "quiet" means different things depending on the environment. In my home office or workplace, a CRT-era iMac seemed dead quiet. It was only when sleeping in the home office/guest bedroom that I realized how irritating hard drive whine can be when it's the *only* sound in the room.
If the Mac mini is any quieter than my iMac DV, it'd pass muster as a video server in my living room.
While five years in the workplace probably helps, for God's sake, don't wait ten years like I did. The first thing the school looks for is signs of Alzheimer's, having you (re)take a semister or two of upper division courses. Understandable, but still a pain in the ass.
After two weeks in Orlando on business, I elected to spend my free day making the trip out to the Cape, rather than EPCOT. I knew that Houston's S-V was still sitting in the rain, but had forgotten that KSC has a copy, too. The kids will like the various exhibits at the Moon Rocket "shed", but just walking under the vehicle itself was worth the $32, as was a drive by of the VAB while en route on the tour bus. I found the size of the thing living up to my imagining, a pleasant surprise akin to seeing the Spruce Goose when it was in Long Beach.
As a percentage of local GNP, what Israel gets in aid dwafts what various NATO nations got in aid during the Cold War (not including the despoiled Europe of the late 40's).
I think what the previous poster was alluding to is the idea that Israeli policy is more intransigent with billions in US economic and military aid to prop up their economy than it would be without. Whether this is strictly true, or if the Israelis would just suck it in and damn the torpedoes is beside the point: most Israelis and their neighbors assume it's true.
As someone pointed out yesterday while annotating a Neal Stephenson classic, Apple is a hardware company that just happens to need a lot of software to make said h/w useful. Apple bought SoundJam and added an on-line music store front end to it as a service that would differentiate iPods in the marketplace. The user wants Apple to unbundle the service he prefers, rather than use one of several alternative service/hardware combos.
In a related story, I'm suing Microsoft for not providing Redhat RPMs on the Windows Update site.
Yeah, if only. Viking II was accidentally powered down by mission controllers. It'd be a (moderately) interesting engineering exercise to look at the what it would take to recycle the logic in situ. However, even if the two MERs were bullet proof designs, capable of 1k+ miles of travel, they wouldn't be able to make it, Viking II being too far north for the rovers' solar panels to generate sufficient juice.
I'm assuming that you're calling the previous poster a hypocrite? If so, asking someone if their hardware was sourced overseas during a discussion about whether their own job might end up offshored is a non-sequitur.
Virtually none of the hardware you list is made in the USA. Unlike cars and stereo equipment, US consumers didn't run away from US brands, rather the holders of the brands sent all of their production overseas. The cause may have been a drive to reduce costs, but the result wasn't something the customers could conscously control. Not like the sort of X vs. Y choice they had when comparing Fords and Toyotas.
One day your descendants might look back on it shamefully, even if you would rather pretend that it was all irrelevant pretense to your current situation.
If they choose to feel shame, it's their choice. I can't know what'll drive them any more than I can know what previous generations were thinking when they plowed through Amerindians. In the meantime, 290 million transplants and their spawn aren't right or wrong, they just are. They, I, can try to make amends to the survivors of past onslaughts, but there's no fixing it, and to argue the right of the newcomers to stand where they are, in the larger sense, is pointless.
Maybe if you could explain where the previous poster said anything about land ownership, your post would rate better than (Score:0).
Previous poster is (presumably) a US citizen, has enough in common with the Anglo-American culture to post an intelligable message on Slashdot, and (again, presumably) has no detectable links to the lands of his/her ancestors. Not Native enough to live on a rez without marriage into a recognized tribe, but Native enough to count as standard-issue American.
>> tend to forget that their parents or grandparents were immigrants too?
> Because nobody resents new immigrants like old immigrants.
Because, if the Nth generation of an immigrant has assimilated, their self-image is native. I'm a choy-suey of northern European ancestors several generations removed. For someone to tell me that I'm the son of immigrants is on the one hand meanless to me, since if things don't work out in the US, there's no "home" to go back to. Same goes for my southern African-descendant neighbors. While it can also give me hope that the sons and daughters of those now crowding in will make a similar transition, past results are not always indicative of future performance.
I'm not worried about being homeless, but house-less. This is my home.
Yes, the title is a very broad brush. My experience has been that while a majority of the homeschooling parents have their heads screwed on straight, a significant minority range from high maintenance to whack jobs, and are out of traditional schools due to an inability of one to cope with the other. So if you choose to work primarily with home schoolers, be prepared for a few parents that will want to monopolize your time.
As for "worthwhile" private schools, that's going to be a very subjective measure. You might start by checking with the better regarded college prep schools in your area.
It's like Henry Kissinger once said about Iran and Iraq going to war, it's too bad they both can't lose. Here we have two monopolies going at it:
in this corner, a RICO engaging in price fixing, while remolding copyright law and freedom of expression to facilitate said fixing.
in the other corner, a corporation that is removing economic value from world-wide commerce as a whole, while concentrating what surplus value is left in it's own pockets.
"I don't think there is a music supplier in America who really enjoys doing business with Wal-Mart," says one major-label rep. Oh yeah? I don't think there's any supplier that likes doing business with Walmart, because virtually all of them either lose money or barely break even doing it... they do it only so that some other sucker doesn't take their shelf space to gain market share.
I'm really hard pressed to find a favorate here. If I were a record exec, I'd have no problem telling Walmart to go screw themselves, and defending that position in a stockholders' meeting. As a Walmart buyer, I'd have no qualms screwing the seller to the wall.
MXS, the company behind CherryOS, Maui X-Stream, and the vx30.com web hosting service, isn't showing me a brick-and-mortar so far. Hitting the Google caches, I find 'contact' pages that alternately list a Wailuku and a Lahaina office, both of which were copyright 2003. I tried the Wailuku address during lunch. The office was empty, sign removed from door, and no listing on the building directory. I may try the Lahaina address for fun over the weekend.
A short article appeared on the Wisconson Technology Network, among other places, whose author evidently ran into Aren Kryeziu at a hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii, and talked briefly about Maui X-stream. Unfortunately, the company office is in Wailuku, rather than the Maui tech park in Kihei, so I'll have to wait until lunch to drive over to check 'em out. Among the techno clique I've talked to in the tech park, nobody has heard of these guys. In all fairness, it's not unusual for someone to cut loose from the rat race in San Jose for a house on Maui, doing their own thing at the home office
Regarding Jay's points on the Bush environment record:
1) Air quality has improved because of the inertia from previous policies put in place by both major parties. Automotive polution controls and smokestack scrubbers, et al, have continued to work, and as old cars and factories go off line, the net effect is improvement. The current administration is taking credit for the effect of policies they'd like to scale back.
2) Bad fire seasons come in cycles, beyond the control of people. How bad is under their control, based on the nature of their forest management. The Forest and Park Services have been practicing 'controlled' burns for twenty years, doing what we used to let nature do at random. Unfortunately, random burns caused by weather and assholes have stayed ahead of the forest management budget. So...
The Bush Administration looked to have the private sector help out by clearing out dead and dying crap that really gets a fire going. At issue was that these policies were written by lobbists from the lumber industry. Sure, they'd be subject experts, but also motivated to take their best shot at harvesting the good with the bad.
The assumption among policy opponents is that the forest industry was just using this as a chance to cut without much oversight, since just about all western forests are stressed and a fire hazard due to prolonged drought, water diversions, and urban encroachment.
You forgot one: until our troops actually fire their weapons, the nuclear waste will be in a holster next to certain sensitive parts of the anatomy.
That works for a mod Funny, but isn't realistic. First off, DU ammo isn't used in hand carried firearms, so it ain't sitting next to the 'nads. In the APCs, tanks, and aircraft it is used by, it's either in the magazine, in the barrel, or on it's way, ergo, plenty of distance and metal between the ammo and the user. Even the loader in an M1 isn't spending all that much time caressing the subset of his shells that are DU.
As it turns out, my hardcopy of The Economist hit my mailbox yesterday. The gist of the article:
The plasma and LCD OEMs overestimated demand at the initial price points last Xmas and early '04, so everyone except the consumers are sitting on a lot of stock.
A number of large LCD plants have or are about to come online, pushing down the prices for TV and computer displays.
Thus, LCDs in the 30 to 45 inch category are becoming price-competitive with plasma displays. However, plasmas still have performance advantages, especially when watching sports.
As a result, I think it's pretty obvious that those of us who held back at Costco last Xmas are going to reap rewards this time.
A more interesting question is total cost of ownership; i.e. how much money this really saves over the long run (factoring in things like the fact that the PTA is probably giving the schools grief because the students are learning Office or similar skills that will help them get jobs... believe me, this happens).
I'm afraid you lost me there. Are you saying a PTA wants students to gain MS Office skills, or that they don't? In any case, I agree with you, some data would be nice. At my son's public elementary, they're lucky enough that the Hawaii DOE pays to have a couple of staff members manage the computers and teach the computer labs. The TCO would all depend on whether said staff members purchase a clue about Linux or not. At the moment, the school's iMacs are all running MacOS 9.
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I've performed some boring tasks, but the good has greatly outweighed the not-so-good, and the three companies I've put my previous 20 years into have all seemed to value employees with full lives.
Other than a couple of years with Sears, and a summer swabbing toliets, all of my working life has directly or indirectly helped to give the American warfighter the edge. If you're not comfortable with that line of work, either laugh it off (I don't kill anybody, the guys and girls down in the proximity fuze group, they kill 'em), or work for someone else.
BTW, defense work ain't all Republican$ or Dubya supporters by a long shot. We're all adults here, and most can see beyond the idiot du joir.
Rupert frickin' Murdock owns a major piece of satellite direct broadcast, which as a whole is almost a monopoly. Most of the internet content that most people see and hear is owned or controlled by the same faces that own/control existing modes of info transmission.TCP transmission has become very concentrated, as has cellular infrastructure.
So, where's all this competition Mr. Powell talked about? It's nonexistant. It's looking like the stewards of US industry didn't mind the previous Soviet command economy per se, just that it wasn't them in command.
The upshot is that eternity is an fscking looooong time, long enough for the trillion or so years until the last star dims to be but a tick in time. Time enough for the biggest black holes to evaporate, time enough for protons and neutrons to decay. Time enough for the likes of you and I to go nuts waiting for the other shoe to drop. Plenty of time to decide, lets blow this chicken stand for a party with some action.
For someone whose body might be good for a thousand years, all else being equal s/he is probably going to slowly knock the shit out of themselves. Think of the accumulation of injuries many of us have picked up over 20, 30, or (for me) 40 years. Hell, by the time many people make it to 60, they're pretty beat up even if basically healthy.
Now try avoiding all that wear and tear with ten times our current reasonable max lifetime. How boring of a life are we willing to live to avoid twisted ankles, separated ribs, bumps to the head, or food poisoning, not to mention the everyday accumulated risk of transporation, equipment failures, natural disasters, screwing in a freakin' light bulb. The mind boggles at the possibilities. Give me a shot at it!
Ah, spoken like a true soon-to-be multiple divorcee or comfirmed bachelor. ;-)
Getting back on topic, Apple has already recouped their investment and then some on the iPod. Given that all Pods are made in China and there's plenty of margin to shave, I'm guessing that when the current fad passes and high capacity, solid state mp3 players are a commodity, Apple could still be a major player if branding still matters. Whether Apple elects to play is the only question.
the blob seems to be about the thickness of a good skipping stone, while the aeroshell is mostly honeycombed aluminum or titanium, made of metal sheets much the same thickness as a soda can.
If enough Titanium melted from the aeroshell to make that one blob, it wouldn't be the only blob, and we wouldn't have enough rover left to take its picture.
The rock is embedded in the dune such as to suggest wind has had time to blow the sand around it. Other evidence suggests that the various sand ripples you see haven't moved much in thousands of years. The grains in the surface crust are somewhat cemented together, and the thin Martain wind has a hell of a time moving a grain of sand, much less make an impression on the crust over the course of a year.
Depending on the jurisdiction, it often appears that the BS threshold is so high as to make defemation of public figures outright legal. The reason is that courts feel that the right to openly discuss those in power outweighs the powerfuls' right to slap folks talking stink about them. Movie, tv, and recording stars are for the most part collateral victims.
If the Mac mini is any quieter than my iMac DV, it'd pass muster as a video server in my living room.
While five years in the workplace probably helps, for God's sake, don't wait ten years like I did. The first thing the school looks for is signs of Alzheimer's, having you (re)take a semister or two of upper division courses. Understandable, but still a pain in the ass.
After two weeks in Orlando on business, I elected to spend my free day making the trip out to the Cape, rather than EPCOT. I knew that Houston's S-V was still sitting in the rain, but had forgotten that KSC has a copy, too. The kids will like the various exhibits at the Moon Rocket "shed", but just walking under the vehicle itself was worth the $32, as was a drive by of the VAB while en route on the tour bus. I found the size of the thing living up to my imagining, a pleasant surprise akin to seeing the Spruce Goose when it was in Long Beach.
I think what the previous poster was alluding to is the idea that Israeli policy is more intransigent with billions in US economic and military aid to prop up their economy than it would be without. Whether this is strictly true, or if the Israelis would just suck it in and damn the torpedoes is beside the point: most Israelis and their neighbors assume it's true.
In a related story, I'm suing Microsoft for not providing Redhat RPMs on the Windows Update site.
Yeah, if only. Viking II was accidentally powered down by mission controllers. It'd be a (moderately) interesting engineering exercise to look at the what it would take to recycle the logic in situ. However, even if the two MERs were bullet proof designs, capable of 1k+ miles of travel, they wouldn't be able to make it, Viking II being too far north for the rovers' solar panels to generate sufficient juice.
Virtually none of the hardware you list is made in the USA. Unlike cars and stereo equipment, US consumers didn't run away from US brands, rather the holders of the brands sent all of their production overseas. The cause may have been a drive to reduce costs, but the result wasn't something the customers could conscously control. Not like the sort of X vs. Y choice they had when comparing Fords and Toyotas.
If they choose to feel shame, it's their choice. I can't know what'll drive them any more than I can know what previous generations were thinking when they plowed through Amerindians. In the meantime, 290 million transplants and their spawn aren't right or wrong, they just are. They, I, can try to make amends to the survivors of past onslaughts, but there's no fixing it, and to argue the right of the newcomers to stand where they are, in the larger sense, is pointless.
Previous poster is (presumably) a US citizen, has enough in common with the Anglo-American culture to post an intelligable message on Slashdot, and (again, presumably) has no detectable links to the lands of his/her ancestors. Not Native enough to live on a rez without marriage into a recognized tribe, but Native enough to count as standard-issue American.
Hell, I'm feeding the trolls. Slap me.
> Because nobody resents new immigrants like old immigrants.
Because, if the Nth generation of an immigrant has assimilated, their self-image is native. I'm a choy-suey of northern European ancestors several generations removed. For someone to tell me that I'm the son of immigrants is on the one hand meanless to me, since if things don't work out in the US, there's no "home" to go back to. Same goes for my southern African-descendant neighbors. While it can also give me hope that the sons and daughters of those now crowding in will make a similar transition, past results are not always indicative of future performance.
I'm not worried about being homeless, but house-less. This is my home.
As for "worthwhile" private schools, that's going to be a very subjective measure. You might start by checking with the better regarded college prep schools in your area.
in this corner, a RICO engaging in price fixing, while remolding copyright law and freedom of expression to facilitate said fixing.
in the other corner, a corporation that is removing economic value from world-wide commerce as a whole, while concentrating what surplus value is left in it's own pockets.
"I don't think there is a music supplier in America who really enjoys doing business with Wal-Mart," says one major-label rep. Oh yeah? I don't think there's any supplier that likes doing business with Walmart, because virtually all of them either lose money or barely break even doing it... they do it only so that some other sucker doesn't take their shelf space to gain market share.
I'm really hard pressed to find a favorate here. If I were a record exec, I'd have no problem telling Walmart to go screw themselves, and defending that position in a stockholders' meeting. As a Walmart buyer, I'd have no qualms screwing the seller to the wall.
MXS, the company behind CherryOS, Maui X-Stream, and the vx30.com web hosting service, isn't showing me a brick-and-mortar so far. Hitting the Google caches, I find 'contact' pages that alternately list a Wailuku and a Lahaina office, both of which were copyright 2003. I tried the Wailuku address during lunch. The office was empty, sign removed from door, and no listing on the building directory. I may try the Lahaina address for fun over the weekend.
A short article appeared on the Wisconson Technology Network, among other places, whose author evidently ran into Aren Kryeziu at a hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii, and talked briefly about Maui X-stream. Unfortunately, the company office is in Wailuku, rather than the Maui tech park in Kihei, so I'll have to wait until lunch to drive over to check 'em out. Among the techno clique I've talked to in the tech park, nobody has heard of these guys. In all fairness, it's not unusual for someone to cut loose from the rat race in San Jose for a house on Maui, doing their own thing at the home office
Regarding Jay's points on the Bush environment record:
1) Air quality has improved because of the inertia from previous policies put in place by both major parties. Automotive polution controls and smokestack scrubbers, et al, have continued to work, and as old cars and factories go off line, the net effect is improvement. The current administration is taking credit for the effect of policies they'd like to scale back.
2) Bad fire seasons come in cycles, beyond the control of people. How bad is under their control, based on the nature of their forest management. The Forest and Park Services have been practicing 'controlled' burns for twenty years, doing what we used to let nature do at random. Unfortunately, random burns caused by weather and assholes have stayed ahead of the forest management budget. So...
The Bush Administration looked to have the private sector help out by clearing out dead and dying crap that really gets a fire going. At issue was that these policies were written by lobbists from the lumber industry. Sure, they'd be subject experts, but also motivated to take their best shot at harvesting the good with the bad.
The assumption among policy opponents is that the forest industry was just using this as a chance to cut without much oversight, since just about all western forests are stressed and a fire hazard due to prolonged drought, water diversions, and urban encroachment.
That works for a mod Funny, but isn't realistic. First off, DU ammo isn't used in hand carried firearms, so it ain't sitting next to the 'nads. In the APCs, tanks, and aircraft it is used by, it's either in the magazine, in the barrel, or on it's way, ergo, plenty of distance and metal between the ammo and the user. Even the loader in an M1 isn't spending all that much time caressing the subset of his shells that are DU.
The plasma and LCD OEMs overestimated demand at the initial price points last Xmas and early '04, so everyone except the consumers are sitting on a lot of stock.
A number of large LCD plants have or are about to come online, pushing down the prices for TV and computer displays.
Thus, LCDs in the 30 to 45 inch category are becoming price-competitive with plasma displays. However, plasmas still have performance advantages, especially when watching sports.
As a result, I think it's pretty obvious that those of us who held back at Costco last Xmas are going to reap rewards this time.
I'm afraid you lost me there. Are you saying a PTA wants students to gain MS Office skills, or that they don't? In any case, I agree with you, some data would be nice. At my son's public elementary, they're lucky enough that the Hawaii DOE pays to have a couple of staff members manage the computers and teach the computer labs. The TCO would all depend on whether said staff members purchase a clue about Linux or not. At the moment, the school's iMacs are all running MacOS 9.